Archive for the 'Friday' Category

The last hour has been pretty interesting. I’m having some people over tonight and I thought to go buy a bottle of Vodka for our enjoyment. I settled on a bottle of Belvedere, which I purchased from the local LCBO. Belvedere means ‘Beautiful to See’ and named after the Royal Palace in Warsaw. I had heard great things about this Vodka and decided to jump the gun and pour myself a glass. My first impressions were good, the Vodka is smooth and lives up to the hype. I had heard that Snapple (particularly Banana) was a great mix with Belvedere. Unfortunately Banana Snapple isn’t sold in Canada, so I decided to experiment with Lemon and Peach. I don’t think this drink (Lemon Snapple + Belvedere) has a name, but it should. While I was enjoying my new found drink, I thought to lookup some info about Snapple. Like most big brands, Snapple has been plagued with a bunch of rumours surrounding the company, it’s founders and it’s products. One that I found particularly interesting was the claim that Osama bin Laden owns Snapple. Obviously this is a bogus claim, but I can definitely see how and why the rumour started. From here I thought to myself, who owns this amazing juice that goes so well with Belvedere? Cadbury Schweppes. The company trades in New York through an ADR and has been beaten down pretty hard the last couple months. They’ve been trying to sell-off the Snapple brand, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. The potential buyers appear to have trouble securing financing needed, because of the sub-prime meltdown and credit crunch. So there you go, an hour of randomness summed up with a glass of Lemon Snapple + Belvedere.

Update (Nov. 20 2006): The more I thought about this manifesto the more annoyed I became. This reeks of shameless self promotion. Furthermore after learning about Garlinghouse’s track record and reading Kevin Kelleher article from the TheStreet.com I couldn’t agree more:

So, now heads must roll at Yahoo!. If so, I’d like to nominate the first one: Brad Garlinghouse.

Things have been busy this last couple weeks, but nothing really that I can disclose. That coupled with things coming up prevented me from writing a wrap-up the last couple weeks.

I came across across an article on MarketWatch about the Peanut Butter Manifesto – an internal (now external) memo written by Yahoo! exec Brad Garlinghouse. After reading other reports, I learned that this has been circulating inside Yahoo for the last couple weeks now. Garlinghouse is a gutsy guy a confused fellow and actually (had) shaved a Y into the back of his head. Initially I thought this was purposely leaked as a precursor to big changes coming – after reading the memo, I think it may have been purposely leaked but for other reasons..

I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular. I hate peanut butter. We all should.

The entire letter can be read from the WSJ.

This was a busy week, a lot of catching up from all the time spent at CASCON last week. Continuing on from last week, I’ve gotten more intimate (?) with Dojo and its inner workings. I wrote about Dojo a couple months ago, and I’m still really impressed with everything going on there. A lot of big name sites are built off this toolkit, including Meebo.

IBM results came out last week, the System i had a rough quarter, but IBM did well overall. Last year at this time (3Q05) the System i had a break out quarter due to an upgrade cycle. This year (3Q06) there were no new upgrades and results were the same as 3Q04. This article sums things up:

IBM revenue for the System i fell 22 percent in the third quarter of 2006, or 23 percent at constant currency when compared to the same period of 2005. At the same time, nearly every other major IBM business unit saw revenue increase. Overall, earnings rose 47 percent compared to the previous year, up to $2.22 billion on revenues of $22.6 billion, which were up 5 percent.

The supply chain issues IBM faced in the second quarter of this year for System i sales, which were connected to a 7 percent drop in revenue for System i over the second quarter of 2005, have cleared up. IBM CFO Mark Loughridge noted that IBM’s supply chain did a superb job delivering System p, i, z, and storage but faltered over System x deliveries, contributing to the low rise of 4 percent for the System x. System p revenues increased 10 percent, and System z was a breakout star with a 25 percent increase in revenues while IBM delivered a 16 percent increase in System z MIPS (millions of instructions per second).

For the System i, IBM says 3Q06 compares to a particularly strong 3Q05 quarter, which was driven by upgrade activity from a fully refreshed roadmap, which in turn caused slowing revenue as customers leveraged those previous upgrades. Overall, IBM notes that System i revenue performance remains dependent upon cyclical upgrades.

I was at a Halloween fund raiser for Diabetes last night, it was a good time for a good cause. I’m amazed that no matter what type of social event I may be at, there’s always someone thats directly involved with the System i in some way.

In other news, RedHat got murdered this week in the markets. Cisco announced they would be creating a fork the RedHat’s version of Linux and providing half price support until the new year. If any good can be seen out of this, it just re-affirms RedHat’s dominance in the Enterprise Linux market.

FireFox 2 came out this week, it generally seems more responsive, but definitely not as polished as it should be. The memory leak issue doesn’t seem to have been fixed, since as I type FireFox is using upwards of 80mb memory and climbing. The new spell checking feature is great though, any work misspelled get underlined in red, right click the and suggestions appear.

CASCON was running this week from Monday to Thursday. I didn’t realize this was a free conference for everyone, including people outside IBM. I saw a bunch of professors from McMaster also, some were giving talks.

I went to the Ruby on Rails workshop and it was going OK until one of the presenters starting comparing Ruby on Rails (RoR) to PHP. People need to get something straight: Ruby is the programming language and Rails is a framework. Comparing RoR to PHP isn’t fair, since PHP is the programming language with no framework. If you’re going to compare them, make sure your using some type of template engine like Smarty, etc.

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I had a display at the Technology Showcase from 11:30am to 1:30pm, presenting WDSC and JWL. The experience was good, I met a lot of great people really interested in AJAX and JSF.

Doug Crockford is a smart guy, he’s a JavaScript guru and the creator of JSON. Earlier this year he wrote a paper describing JSONRequest, here’s the abstract:

XMLHttpRequest has a security model which is inadequate for supporting the next generation of web applications. JSONRequest is proposed as a new browser service that allows for two-way data exchange with any JSON data server without exposing users or organization to harm. It exchanges data between scripts on pages with JSON servers in the web. It is hoped that browser makers will build this feature into their products in order to enable the next advance in web application development.

It’s a good read and not a bad idea (though received a lot of criticism). There has also been heavy discussion about this on the Dojo mailing list. Doug’s personal website is filled with great JavaScript articles and resources – especially this article on objects in JavaScript.

I read Chapter 5 of Roy Fielding’s dissertation, which introduced REST or Representational State Transfer. REST is a lot like the Relational Database, conceptually its easy, but has the potential to revolutionize how we do certain things.

Update (Nov. 18 2006): I’ll try and do this weekly, but no guarantees.

Last thing I want to do is write another AJAX framework, but it seems that’s the only way to fully understand large-scale AJAX development. We’ll see what happens — I’ve spent a lot of time looking into Object Notations (ON) (JSON, YAML, etc.) this past week, weighing out trade-offs between run-time extensions to server side scripts. I’ve been getting a lot of people asking for another AJAX tutorial to continue from the original — I’ll try and write something soon.

This past Tuesday, I sat in on the 3rd and final Technology Showcase my 2nd line manager had organized. This one in particular was on C, C++, and Fortran Compilers. A lot of cool stuff in the works, we even got a demo (video) of the PS3 in action.

Motivated by Ryan’s idea of KeyboardCast, I made a couple suggestions to the Target Management (Remote Systems Explorer) subproject in Eclipse, about being able to execute a single shell command on multiple servers (or targets). After some discussions, agreeing to help out in specs/code/discussions, I got sucked into testing for their 1.0 release! Ah, it was ok, I had a small commitment of 2 hours.

I finally submitted my 2nd application for a patent @ IBM. Considering the backlog at the US patent office is something ridiculous like 2+ years — I have a while to wait. The patent is for a revolutionary new type of XML Parser that a manager and I came up with — that’s all I can say about it now.

Next week is the CASCON conference. Aside from the keynotes and walk-in talks, I’ve signed up for 3 workshops:

• Hands-on: Building a Ruby on Rails application with DB2 Express-C 9
• Social Computing: Best Practices
• Social Computing: How the Social Web (R)evolution is Changing the Business Landscape

I’ll also be holding a Technology Showcase @ CASCON on WDSC & JWL Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 11:30am till 1:30pm:

WDSC JWL 3.0 in Action
This exhibit will demonstrate the rich JSF/JavaScript-based widget library JWL. Currently in the finishing stages of development, JWL will revolutionize the way users interact with applications. Widgets/abilities include full AJAX support, key press bindings, calendars, panel dialogs, panel menus, context assist, converters, and much more.

I fallen off my great quest to become an expert at object oriented design patterns — I seriously have to spend some this weekend.